"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
07-10-2017, 12:17 PM (This post was last modified: 07-10-2017, 12:22 PM by Wyrm.)
when the stars threw down their spears and water'd heaven with their tears:
The soaring, muted grey eagle hasn’t thought about his extended family in quite some time.
Why would he? The finality of helping to murder his own sire seemed enough reason to bury past transgressions and leave the dead sleeping where they lie, but his reasoning had been wrong. If he had killed for good, truly for good, then it would mean involving everyone who deserved or wanted to know. With an angry pump of his wings, Wyrm just wishes there hadn’t been so many to try and track down. What use had it been for his father to copulate so often and so recklessly? A selfish man with selfish desires, that’s what he pins it down to. He’ll never have the chance to truly know now, anyways.
He knew of four offspring, himself included. His twin, Kudu, had long since disappeared again. Umqra had been predicted to show in the Chamber as a filly long ago, but she’d been a bust. So the weight of his ancestors practice had been dumped unceremoniously on Circinae’s shoulders and, after all these years, it was her that Wyrm had sought out. That meeting had gone rather … awkwardly, but in the end she’d agreed to meet him near the heart of the Riverlands, where the earth curved away from the incessant beating of the sea.
It was there that he began his descent, gliding over the whitecaps of the turbulent water before reaching out with sharp talons to grip a wet, cold branch in a quick landing. He preens, fully expecting to be ahead of his half-siblings arrival by hours, and when he turns a wide eye back to the land beneath him he finds (with mild surprise) that the river has opened its gaping mouth into a whirlpool. Up from the swirling depths rises Circinae, a bit wet but as graceful as one could manage in a situation like her own, her colored hooves steadily dipping into the pebbled shore.
Wyrm descends, shifts, and lands abruptly before her with a skittish halt. “Water manipulation?” He presses curiously, only to be chided by a sour look from his younger half-sister. “Teleportation.” She corrects sharply, putting an end to their warm introductions. Wyrm appreciates it.
“Lupei is dead.” The wolfkin tells her, that sacred name echoing through the sparse trunks around them.
did he smile his work to see? did he who made the Lamb make thee?
I'm telling these tears, "Go and fall away, fall away."
May the last one burn into flames.
“Lupei is dead.”
That statement said so matter-of-factly, sends a jolt of disbelief through Lestrade. His reluctant caretaker, a man who had recklessly set a kingdom on fire just because he could, was dead. Their relationship was hard to define. Lupei was just like his white-hot flames – hard to get close to and dangerous. He had hardly been the comforting shoulder to cry on when the young boy had been violently thrust from his mother’s side years ago.
But, at least, he wasn’t dead yet.
The wolf cared in his own standoffish way, even if Lestrade could never understand why. Lupei was smart on the uptake and recognized mint and violet child as one of his own, though he had never been generous enough to share his knowledge of their familial ties to the boy in question. He had helped Lestrade survive the dangerous residents of the Chamber (in particular keeping the child from trying to drop kick the oblivious Kingslay whom caused his separation in the first place and from maliciously chasing after many of Straia’s magical raven spies). After the Reckoning occurred, Lupei made sure he had lived and the wolf had continued to seek him out every once in a while. Although their relationship had been tenuous at best, it remained the only steady relationship to a living person that Lestrade had.
But that connection had now been extinguished.
And Lestrade would have carried on clueless for god knows how long before he realized that Lupei hadn’t visited him in a long while. The stallion could certainly be said to have a sense for unlucky timing (see the example of traumatic giant flame walls with the recent addition of proclamations of death in his case file). The mint stallion furiously strode from the foliage he had been passing through towards the messenger of bad news. He was slightly taken aback by the array of greens before him, his own coat color reflecting the same color scheme. But he could not be deterred from the one crucial, startling fact that this stranger had conveyed.
when the stars threw down their spears and water'd heaven with their tears:
The shock in Circinae’s eyes says everything that refuses to spill out of her mouth. To be fair, Wyrm had been shocked when the rumors had first begun to grow - passing from lip to lip that somewhere, near the western edge of their land, a wolf had begun to prowl on innocents. Stealing children and mauling older horses with no design or purpose to the madness. It only began to take shape once the green stallion had tracked down the victims, finding that most were in some way related to himself and his half-sibling. The signs were too obvious to ignore: Lupei was prowling again, picking off the undesirables bit by bit.
Sad part was, Wyrm hadn’t waited to see what the ultimate goal for such actions were. Perhaps Lupei had wanted to extinguish any who might have carried his stolen gift, keep them from rising against him. Wyrm was also painfully aware that his sire had taken the path of the wolf very seriously and any of his lineage who fell short of those expectations were more than likely viewed as unworthy of the trait. Whatever the reason may have been it didn’t matter now. The old wolf had been mad in his final moments, frothing and raving about incidents time had long forgotten.
Wyrm takes her silence as permission to continue so his jaw drops loose, “He-” slipping out before the noise of hooves breaking through underbrush draws first both viridian ears, then his emerald head, in the direction that Lestrade bursts through. The newcomer is painted like a poisonous frog, with a tongue sharpened for questions that don’t particularly arouse a smile over Wyrm’s mouth as he takes him in. The shifter lets the inquiries lie for a moment, the silence stretching briefly before he moves away from Circy. With few steps he meets the spotted stallion’s eyes measure for measure, wet lips peeling back to reveal needled teeth as his ears lower to his neck.
“Shut that rude mouth tight, boy,” He hisses, chin slacking so the compressed air can blow across the other horses’ nose. “eavesdropping will get it ripped clean off your face, if you’re not careful.”
Circinae, though, finds no pleasure in her brother’s actions. “Enough.” She spits, drawing alongside the green man to peer curiously at the third member of their growing party. “Did you know our father, or are you just here to fill up on gossip?”
did he smile his work to see? did he who made the Lamb make thee?
